people, there are lots of them up north, so he couldn’t have conquered all of them. As for maple leaves, they’re the hardest part to draw on our red flag. Nobody ever gets them right.
Miss Lumley brings newspaper clippings about the Royal Family and sticks them to the side blackboard. Some of them are old clippings, and show Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose, in Girl Guide uniforms, making radio and other speeches during the Blitz. This is what we should be like, Miss Lumley implies: steadfast, loyal, courageous, heroic.
There are other newspaper pictures too, showing thin-looking children in scruffy clothes, standing in front of piles of rubble. These are to remind us that there are many starving war orphans in Europe, and we should remember that and eat our bread crusts and potato skins and everything else on our plates, because waste is a sin. Also we should not complain. We are not really entitled to complain, because we are lucky children: English children got their houses bombed and we did not. We bring our used clothing, from home, and Miss Lumley ties it up into brown paper packages and sends it to England. There isn’t much I can bring, because my mother tears our worn-out clothing up for dusters, but I manage to salvage a pair of corduroy pants, once my brother’s, then mine, now too small, and a Viyella shirt of my father’s that got washed wrong by mistake and shrank. It gives me a strange feeling on my skin to think of someone else, someone in England, walking around in my clothes. My clothes seem a part of me, even the ones I’ve outgrown.
All these things—the flags, the pitch pipe songs, the British Empire and the princesses, the war orphans, even the strappings—are superimposed against the ominous navy-blue background of Miss Lumley’s invisible bloomers. I can’t draw the Union Jack or sing “God Save the King” without thinking about them. Do they really exist, or not? Will I ever be in the classroom when she puts them on or—unthinkable—takes them off?
I’m not afraid of snakes or worms but I am afraid of these bloomers. I know it will be the worse for me if I ever actually catch sight of them. They’re sacrosanct, at the same time holy and deeply shameful. Whatever is wrong with them may be wrong with me also, because although Miss Lumley is not what anyone thinks of as a girl, she is also not a boy. When the brass handbell clangs and we line up outside our GIRLS door, whatever category we are in also includes her.
Four – Deadly Nightshade
Chapter 16
I walk along Queen Street, past used comic book stores, windows full of crystal eggs and seashells, a lot of sulky black clothing. I wish I were back in Vancouver, in front of the fireplace with Ben, looking out over the harbor, while the giant slugs munch away at the greenery in the back garden. Fireplaces, back gardens: I wasn’t thinking about them when I used to come down here to visit Jon, over the wholesale luggage store. Around the corner was the Maple Leaf Tavern, where I drank draft beer in the dark, two stoplights away from the art school where I drew naked women and ate my heart out. The streetcars rattled the front windows. There are still streetcars.
“I don’t want to go,” I said to Ben.
“You don’t have to,” he said. “Call it off. Come down to Mexico.”
“They’ve gone to all the trouble,” I said. “Listen, you know how hard it is to get a retrospective anywhere, if you’re female?”
“Why is it important?” he said. “You sell anyway.”
“I have to go,” I said. “It wouldn’t be right.” I was brought up to say please and thank you.
“Okay,” he said. “You know what you’re doing.” He gave me a hug.
I wish it were true.
Here is Sub-Versions, between a restaurant supply store and a tattoo parlor. Both of these will go, in time: once places like Sub-Versions move in, the handwriting’s on the wall. I open the gallery door, walk in with that sinking feeling I
Miss Lumley brings newspaper clippings about the Royal Family and sticks them to the side blackboard. Some of them are old clippings, and show Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose, in Girl Guide uniforms, making radio and other speeches during the Blitz. This is what we should be like, Miss Lumley implies: steadfast, loyal, courageous, heroic.
There are other newspaper pictures too, showing thin-looking children in scruffy clothes, standing in front of piles of rubble. These are to remind us that there are many starving war orphans in Europe, and we should remember that and eat our bread crusts and potato skins and everything else on our plates, because waste is a sin. Also we should not complain. We are not really entitled to complain, because we are lucky children: English children got their houses bombed and we did not. We bring our used clothing, from home, and Miss Lumley ties it up into brown paper packages and sends it to England. There isn’t much I can bring, because my mother tears our worn-out clothing up for dusters, but I manage to salvage a pair of corduroy pants, once my brother’s, then mine, now too small, and a Viyella shirt of my father’s that got washed wrong by mistake and shrank. It gives me a strange feeling on my skin to think of someone else, someone in England, walking around in my clothes. My clothes seem a part of me, even the ones I’ve outgrown.
All these things—the flags, the pitch pipe songs, the British Empire and the princesses, the war orphans, even the strappings—are superimposed against the ominous navy-blue background of Miss Lumley’s invisible bloomers. I can’t draw the Union Jack or sing “God Save the King” without thinking about them. Do they really exist, or not? Will I ever be in the classroom when she puts them on or—unthinkable—takes them off?
I’m not afraid of snakes or worms but I am afraid of these bloomers. I know it will be the worse for me if I ever actually catch sight of them. They’re sacrosanct, at the same time holy and deeply shameful. Whatever is wrong with them may be wrong with me also, because although Miss Lumley is not what anyone thinks of as a girl, she is also not a boy. When the brass handbell clangs and we line up outside our GIRLS door, whatever category we are in also includes her.
Four – Deadly Nightshade
Chapter 16
I walk along Queen Street, past used comic book stores, windows full of crystal eggs and seashells, a lot of sulky black clothing. I wish I were back in Vancouver, in front of the fireplace with Ben, looking out over the harbor, while the giant slugs munch away at the greenery in the back garden. Fireplaces, back gardens: I wasn’t thinking about them when I used to come down here to visit Jon, over the wholesale luggage store. Around the corner was the Maple Leaf Tavern, where I drank draft beer in the dark, two stoplights away from the art school where I drew naked women and ate my heart out. The streetcars rattled the front windows. There are still streetcars.
“I don’t want to go,” I said to Ben.
“You don’t have to,” he said. “Call it off. Come down to Mexico.”
“They’ve gone to all the trouble,” I said. “Listen, you know how hard it is to get a retrospective anywhere, if you’re female?”
“Why is it important?” he said. “You sell anyway.”
“I have to go,” I said. “It wouldn’t be right.” I was brought up to say please and thank you.
“Okay,” he said. “You know what you’re doing.” He gave me a hug.
I wish it were true.
Here is Sub-Versions, between a restaurant supply store and a tattoo parlor. Both of these will go, in time: once places like Sub-Versions move in, the handwriting’s on the wall. I open the gallery door, walk in with that sinking feeling I
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